Newly analysed data showed the temperature plunged to -93.2C
(-135.8F) in August 2010 breaking the previous record for the
coldest ever recorded temperature.

Researchers from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in
Boulder, Colorado, joined a team of researchers reporting the
findings on Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San
Francisco.

They made their discovery by analysing global surface
temperature maps using data from remote sensing satellites. After
studying 32 years' worth of data they found that temperatures had
plunged to record lows on dozens of occasions on a high ridge
between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji on the East Antarctic Plateau.

The new record low temperatures smash the previous low of 128.6
F (minus 89.2 C), set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research
Station in East Antarctica.

The report also maintains that the “winters of 1997, 2001, 2003,
and 2004 showed several temperature minima below -90°C.”

Ice scientist Ted Scambos, at the US National Snow and Ice Data
Centre, announced the cold facts at the American Geophysical Union
scientific meeting in San Francisco.

"It's more like you'd see on Mars on a nice summer day in the
poles," Mr Scambos said. "I'm confident that these pockets are the
coldest places on Earth."

"Thank God, I don't know how exactly it feels," Scambos said.
But he said scientists do routinely make naked 100 degree below
zero Fahrenheit (73 degree below zero Celsius) dashes outside in
the South Pole as a stunt, so people can survive that temperature
for about three minutes.

In temperatures as low as the reported record researchers needed
to breathe through a snorkel that brings air into the coat through
a sleeve and warms it up "so you don't inhale by accident" the cold
air, Scambos said.

Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado
and NASA's former chief scientist, and Scambos said this is likely
an unusual random reading in a place that hasn't been measured much
before and could have been colder or hotter in the past and we
wouldn't know.

"It does speak to the range of conditions on this Earth, some of
which we haven't been able to observe," Abdalati said.

Despite the new recorded low it will not be entered into the
Guinness Book of World Records because the temperatures were
satellite measured, not from thermometers, Scambos said.